The OpenID Foundation has launched a new Ecosystems Support Community Group (ESCG) to help public and private sector ecosystem leaders understand the key architectures, decisions, and best practices at the forefront of open banking/open data and digital identity adoption globally. 

Context

The ESCG arrives at a critical time when 90+ jurisdictions are pursuing open banking/open finance/open data, and 60+ are pursuing digital identity, as per the Cambridge Judge School of Business (2024). The ESCG provides a safe space for architects and other ecosystem leaders to convene with other experts. The trusted relationships in this ESCG can not only help inform local decision processes before launch, but also inform ongoing maintenance, roadmap development, and monitor security issues. 

Similar to OIDF’s other community groups (CGs), the ESCG will not develop specifications. Instead, its purpose is to support ecosystem decision-makers as they build and maintain their ecosystems, providing world class, independent, and opinionated views on how to combine, profile, and implement these to realize the benefits of the specifications. 

Building on the OpenID Foundation’s proven track record

The OIDF already plays a central role supporting and connecting ecosystem experts in three key ways: 

1. Convening experts in our Working Groups (WGs), such as FAPI WG, the Digital Credentials Protocols WG, A/B Connect WG, and others.

1. Supporting ecosystems and individual implementers with certification to OIDF specifications (over 4k implementers self-certified to date). 

1. Providing safe spaces for experts to engage, including the Death and Digital Estate Community Group, Australian Digital Trust Community Group and OIDF workshops and conferences. 

This ESCG will play an essential and pragmatic role, providing expertise that cuts across other OIDF WGs/CGs, as well as specifications from peer standards bodies. 

Six core guiding principles

This new ESCG will operate under the following six organising principles:

1. Sharing: provide a safe community environment for ecosystem governing bodies to share experiences and learnings, and to ask questions.
2. Privacy: Promote the enhancement of user privacy and control by using explicit consent mechanisms, accompanied by best practices for informed consent.
3. Security: identify and promote best current security practices for all ecosystem participants.
4. Interoperability: the ESCG must promote the benefits and mechanisms for interoperability across ecosystems irrespective of use case, industry sector or jurisdiction.
5. Recognition: the ESCG will recognise that each ecosystem will need to make its own pragmatic decisions to support its own route towards interoperability over time.  
6. Cost reduction: Promote a lower cost of adoption and change for ecosystem participants (e.g., data recipients, data providers, ecosystem governing bodies, etc.).

The global push for digital wallets and open data

Given the emergence of digital wallet based ecosystems and the global push towards Digital Public Infrastructure, we anticipate that nearly all jurisdictions will push for open data and digital identity deployments in the years ahead. From the 26 ecosystems that the OIDF supports today, we know that most of the decisions each implementer needs to make are very similar. 

While local laws, requirements, and cultures may lead to differences in configuration, the majority of decisions are harmonized across jurisdictions. Furthermore, new ecosystems benefit from the lessons learned from prior implementations and dramatically reduce time-to-market.

Preventing fragmentation of ecosystem standards

As public and private sector ecosystems develop their policies and architectures, they must evaluate technical options, make key governance decisions, and maintain clear communication with implementers.  

The OpenID Foundation is aware of native ecosystem divergences, which, if left unsatisfied, will lead to amplified challenges for security and interoperability across borders and use cases. This will become increasingly difficult to solve as the global market continues to develop at an accelerating pace, with each jurisdiction at risk of becoming an ‘island’ that cannot interoperate with others.  

Resolving the resultant global fragmentation would introduce an expensive cost of change for each implementer within a given ecosystem.

Join the initiative

The OpenID Foundation’s new Ecosystems Support Community Group is open to all who wish to join the conversation and contribute to the discussion.

What we will do:

• Capture existing and emerging ecosystem configurations and develop an Ecosystems Tracker.
• Evaluate key differences between ecosystem configurations and specifications. 
• Assess how to combine different specifications.
• Capture and communicate ecosystems’ requirements to other WGs, OIDF’s conformance test team and OIDF, in general.

The new ESCG will also develop, or initiate the development of, best practices and reference architectures to support different types of ecosystems, assisting key decision-making for governance bodies. These guides will provide recommendations for specifications, associated design of conformance testing, and other aspects of ecosystem development and deployment. 

If you are an ecosystem leader grappling with the policy, technical, and operational challenges of enabling open banking/open data, and/or digital identity, we hope you will consider joining the ESCG to share your own experiences with your peers. 

About the OpenID Foundation

The OpenID Foundation (OIDF) is a global open standards body committed to helping people assert their identity wherever they choose. Founded in 2007, we are a community of technical experts leading the creation of open identity standards that are secure, interoperable, and privacy preserving. The Foundation’s OpenID Connect standard is now used by billions of people across millions of applications. In the last five years, the Financial Grade API has become the standard of choice for Open Banking and Open Data implementations, allowing people to access and share data across entities. Today, the OpenID Foundation’s standards are the connective tissue to enable people to assert their identity and access their data at scale, the scale of the internet, enabling “networks of networks” to interoperate globally. Individuals, companies, governments and non-profits are encouraged to join or participate. Find out more at openid.net.